So Margaret Spelling was the guest tonight on The Colbert Report, and I was pretty disappointed. She came on to talk about what we in the education community refer to as NCLB (usually followed by a curse) or No Child Left Behind. I was really hoping that Stephen would set her up to reveal how awful NCLB is to our country’s educational system, but this did not come to pass. Instead she wooed him with her Wrist Strong bracelet, and continued to talk about how great NCLB is for education.
If you are not familiar with NCLB, it is what is causing education to fail in the United States. It passes the “failure buck” on to teachers and administration and refuses to make the federal government accountable for their lack of educational funding. If you have seen “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” that movie best represents what NCLB is all about (warning: about to nerd out). In the movie the Ministry of Magic interferes at Hogwarts, makes testing the highest priority, and scrutinizes all the teachers there. That is NCLB in a nutshell.
Teachers all over the country are sick of NCLB failing their schools and their kids. If you would like to learn more about NCLB go to http://www.nea.org/esea/index.html .
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Oh I missed it I would've really loved to have seen Stephen go after NCLB (and I usually have the curse preceeding it)...
NCLB just forces training instead of teaching...it is all about getting the right and wrong answer not learning...because there is no reason for kids to learn the lessons just the answers...it forces teachers to teach to the test for the verra simple reason that they will lose their jobs and/or funding if the students do not pass the arbitrary tests.
How arbitrary are the tests?
The tests are extremely arbitrary and do nothing to actually guage the learning or the teaching going on in schools...
the tests have nothing to do with real learning it's about getting the answers right...
schools are picking and choosing who takes teh tests so that the scores are kept up...
it isn't about learning it's busy work...it's about saying that there is only one way to answer a question and having that answer without being able to understand it where the answer came from...or how to get it...
it is paper work...it is something that says hey test scores are going up so the school systems are improving, but they aren't because if students are being taught to the tests then of course they are going to go up, but it is training the students to leaving thinking at the door and just memorize the answers...